A little over 20 minutes into Steven Sebring’s gorgeous, lyrical portrait of Patti Smith, the punk-rock pioneer references Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s famous documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, imitating the way her hero tries to hail a cab in the film by raising his hand in a magisterial manner. “I practiced that for months,” she says laughing. When her director is caught out having not seen the genre-defining classic, Smith playfully admonishes him. “Steven! You have to see it!” It’s clear by the finished product here — which is the result of over a decade of filming Smith at home and on tour all over the world — that he ultimately made the trip to the video store.

This isn’t to say Dream of Life is derivative. While the influence is palpable, this is clearly its own animal in much the same way that Smith, though deeply inspired by Dylan (and many others), is undeniably her own artist. Shot as Sebring and Smith got to know each other, the doc doesn’t attempt to capture a particular period or tell a specific story. Locations and time frames change without citation, and colleagues and old friends like Sam Shepard, Philip Glass, Tom Verlaine and Flea float through scenes without introduction. As the film begins, Smith offers her own autobiographical sketch, declaring that “life is an adventure of our own design, intersecting with fate in a series of happy and unhappy accidents” and the following structure follows this cue with a series of dreamy, episodic insights.

Alternating high-contrast black-and-white with colour and including some highly saturated archival footage from the ’60s and ’70s, Sebring dramatizes Smith’s penchant for persona and mythmaking while allowing her to emerge as human. Her ongoing devotion to those who set her on her way — from Rimbaud and Blake to Burroughs and Mapplethorpe — and her commitment to her children (who grow up suddenly onscreen) and her lifelong opposition to war reveal a strength of character rarely illustrated. This is a beautiful, warm-hearted work.